Amid the South Sea bubble, the famed scientist shifted from being a prudent investor to a speculator who plunged essentially all his capital into a single stock

Was one of the most immortal scientists in history also one of the world’s most mortal investors? In a recent column on the effort to predict stock-market behavior with principles from geophysics, I cited the losses — reputed to exceed $3.6 million in today’s money — that Sir Isaac Newton incurred speculating on London’s notorious […]